Pixel-by-Pixel: Interventions by Luke Murphy
On view through April 10, 2022
Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art (SMoCA)
Scottsdale, Arizona
https://smoca.org/
Luke Murphy subverts and liberates technology through repurposing and recontextualizing it to reveal its innate humanity. To him, technology, screens, and code are physical and fragile in the same ways that we are — we break, crack, glitch, and can get repaired. Murphy works with the LED screens we often see outside advertising the next big thing. He sees LED screens as part of the landscape, and although these light panels are intended to be selling machines, Murphy views them as beautiful, chatty companions, so he uses them as his primary medium, undermining their form and function.
Murphy’s interventions throughout the Museum are interruptions to the norm. His work questions whether our interaction with screens are the real experience and art is simply just the content of the experience. He is interested in exposing the materiality of technology because there is such an effort to hide the material nature of tech to achieve total seamlessness. Murphy is not trying to hide what makes his artwork function, but instead wants to remind us that technology is not fully autonomous and there are networks of energy and material production behind the functionality.
Organized by Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art. Curated by Julie Ganas, curator of engagement and digital initiatives.
[Image: Luke Murphy, CampFire 2.1, 2020. Courtesy of the artist and Canada, New York. Photo: Joe DeNardo]
